NASA Gives Up on LISA (opens in new tab)

At least here in Australia, a common comment on something like this is that we shouldn't spend money on this sort of thing when there are people starving and dying in the third world. Then the typical comments on, say an article about, the plight of the poor in the third world are critical of throwing money abroad when we have problems of our own at home. Then the typical comments on those problems (say, gap in life expectancy between that of the Aboriginal population and the average) find another excuse.

It frustrates me too. I'd love to see military budgets (as one example) plowed into aggressive space research and exploration (as well as third world problems) and uniting the planet.

Maybe the Great Filter of the Fermi Paradox is just the tendency of the masses towards selfish, lazy, basic instinct-driven behaviour.

2)The astronomy community unfortunately can't pay for LISA, JWST, and all of the other smaller projects at the same time. The other solution, as opposed to keeping lisa, would be to cancel the small stuff. But, I think it is more appropriate to go after this large cost item first before the smaller items.

3)You're forgetting that science isn't just composed of these huge projects, there are still tons of smaller projects that have money poured into them. Radio astronomy still receives money and builds nice telescopes (I think the MWA is the most recent). And let's not forget that for Gravitational Waves, LIGO is still being upgraded to LIGO advanced and is expected to directly observe some gravitational waves. Since its arms are much shorter than LISA's, it studies different frequency waves. LISA is expected to study waves from merging black holes while LIGO studies those from merging neutron stars and supernovas.

Like others have said, this is just a low point in the fluctuations of a large budget. It's not the first time we've had to cancel expensive projects, and cool science can still be done.

I'm also an outsider, but I think this is really a money problem. The same thing happened in the USSR in the late '80s, suddenly there was no money for science anymore, it didn't matter that the Soviet scientists had helped produce great things.

Right now there is a massive pullback, but when the economy recovers things will restart.

Take a longer view.

I'm impatient with space exploration and research obviously because the scales involved make it likely that many great achievements won't occur during my lifetime.

So that and your line remind me of:

"The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now."

Hmm. I'm not too familiar with that research area. Isn't the point of detectors like LIGO is that we don't know how big they are typically?

How do we make one hundred percent sure that gravity waves exist? What do you propose as a way that would convince ourselves that they do (or don't), and how do we estimate their size? Has the research community done this already?

However, LIGO/VIRGO aren't a replacement for LISA, as they look at gravity waves of different frequencies: the sources they'd expect to see are different.